Yet rehabilitation was no easy task. A Ministry of Housing and Local Government study estimated that there were still almost two million slum dwellings left in England and Wales, and 4.5 million homes in need of substantial repair. Almost a fifth of houses in England and Wales still had no inside toilet or washbasin.13 These may feel like descriptions of life in bygone centuries, but it’s salutary to remember that this was no longer the age of austerity and bomb-damage: it was 1967, the year of the summer of love, when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Sean Connery starred in his fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. London, at least according to popular myth, was swinging, but housing conditions were still primitive and grim for millions who lived around Britain.
The latest revolution in planning would soon start to have tangible effects. Heath’s government encouraged building societies to make mortgages easier to come by, and that engendered an early seventies boom in home ownership – and in do-it-yourself. There followed a flurry of gentrification as homeowners began to do up houses in seedy London squares in Islington, Notting Hill and Lambeth. These were the kinds of places that until recently, private landlords such as racketeer Peter Rachman had been dividing up into tiny flats in order to charge extortionate rents to poor tenants. These potentially ideal homes had to be reclaimed from criminally neglectful and greedy landlords – and their exploited working class tenants – and often dragged up from slum conditions before they could become the havens of the demographic known today as the ‘chattering classes’.
The more I read and researched, the more I came to realise that many of the most exciting and ambitious schemes of the postwar era can’t be visited, because they were never actually built. The ghosts of London’s failed attempts at modernisation, for instance, are everywhere. One of the most extraordinary examples is at Piccadilly Circus. Although Patrick Abercrombie had diagnosed it as an urgent case for treatment as long ago as 1943 because of its notorious traffic jams, the fifties passed by without any coherent new scheme emerging to salvage it. Developers’ models came and went, only to be dismissed by the London County Council and the government as being unsuitable for such an important historic London landmark. One developer even brought in Walter Gropius to add credibility to the design of a major new building – only to have the elderly Bauhaus founder suggest that there was no point designing a single structure because the entire junction had to go. In 1960 the London County Council hired eminent planner William Holford to come up with a rescue plan for Piccadilly Circus. As in every town centre rebuild since the fifties, developers sensed a killing and moved in, only to be frustrated by the London County Council’s slow progress. ‘The land should have been compulsorily purchased years ago, so that the planning authorities could organise the logical combination of sites,’ developer Joe Levy told the Architects’ Journal, recommending ‘flyovers, underpasses and extensive underground garages’. He finished with a weary flounce: ‘As it is, I doubt I shall ever see it completed.’14
The 1972 plan for the rebuilding of the West End, including the key landowners at Piccadilly Circus. © John H. Hutchinson
Yet the saga dragged on. ‘Something must be done if Piccadilly Circus is to remain the hub of the West End,’ Holford told The Times in 1966. ‘Otherwise it would become like the centre of Los Angeles – an abandoned area given over to traffic. One must try everything to keep Piccadilly a place where people want to go to, particularly in the evenings. Otherwise it would be a terrible confession of defeat.’15 Eight months later he unveiled a new megastructure for the site: the London Pavilion. ‘With pedestrian thoroughfares and services underground, police and traffic control rooms under the deck and open and covered concourses above, the new London Pavilion would be a public building to an even greater extent than the Royal Festival Hall,’ he told The Times. Monico, the famous neon-clad building, would be linked to this new pavillion by a pedestrian deck, moving Piccadilly Circus’ colourful street life up a floor and burying the ‘services’ and cars beneath, on ground level. On the deck would be shops and restaurants, with the offices above clad in illuminated signs. The Trocadero would be rebuilt as a 140-foot high hotel. ‘It is envisaged that ultimately the pedestrian concourse and deck should be extended by means of walkways throughout the circus, possibly up Regent Street, into Soho, towards Leicester Square and eventually as far as Covent Garden.’16 The newsreels covered it, and it was big news in the press. It was even hailed as ‘the biggest breakthrough in planning since Ebenezer Howard developed the garden city.’17 Not by redoubtable architectural critic Ian Nairn, who was frightened by the plan. ‘Can you imagine, on their present performance at Hyde Park Corner and at the Elephant and Castle, just what the GLC entrances to that upper level will look and feel like?’18 The government was equally gloomy. ‘He would be a rash man who tried to guess when the planning process will end and redevelopment will begin,’ wrote Dame Evelyn Sharp from the Ministry of Housing. ‘The general public is all too likely to simply want it to go on looking much as it does at present.’19 Wandering round Piccadilly Circus these days is a dispiriting experience, as you try to navigate its semi-pedestrianised muddle, mustering the courage to cross from one side to the other, only to disappear into the crush of pedestrians funneled into tiny pavements. It’s clear that none of Abercrombie’s valid criticisms from the forties were ever acted upon, let alone any of Holford’s space-age sixties plans. The best hasn’t even been made of a bad job.
‘What, one wondered, had this beautiful bronze slab to do with the City of London, its grey wintry vapours and bowler hats?’ was the response that greeted the unveiling of Mies van der Rohe’s model for a glass-walled office block for Lloyd’s Bank. And that wasn’t the response of the Daily Telegraph, but of Concrete Quarterly.20 The preservationists weren’t keen either, to say the least, having seen much of the City’s Victorian architecture razed by developers since the war. When I interviewed architect James Dunnett, he made an interesting observation about the hoo-ha that surrounded Mies’ project at the time: ‘Neither he, but certainly not the opponents, talk about conditions inside the tower for one minute. They’re not interested. The whole thing is talked about in terms of the pedestrian walking along, the picturesque views or whatever. But that wasn’t what it was for. The idea was a building like that was designed to improve the conditions of office workers. And it’s for the office workers that the buildings are being built … The conditions inside the buildings are the key to understanding what modern architecture is about, which for some reason the generation who came to fruition in the fifties and early sixties understood, but then they were suddenly forgotten about by everybody. Because people were traumatised by the disruptive effect on the fabric of the cities.’ In the event, Mies’ design was dropped, and Lloyds eventually moved into a fantastic deconstructed building by Richard Rogers some streets away.
Yet the outcry surrounding Piccadilly Circus and Mies’s Lloyds building paled to nothing beside that provoked by the redevelopment of Covent Garden. Firstly, to relieve traffic congestion, the ancient fruit and vegetable market had been moved from its home in central London to the run-down back-streets of Battersea, south of the Thames. Then, as mentioned in the Piccadilly Circus plan, Greater London Council planned to redevelop the grand old market site and a fifth of the West End with it. There would be a gigantic shopping centre, a hotel, an international conference centre, as well as ring roads, car parks and flats. Unfortunately, the seventeenth-century piazza, nineteenth-century neoclassical market building and many other icons of post-Great Fire development stood in the way. Protests from residents’ groups began in 1971: the alarm had been raised by Brian Anson, Greater London Council’s community liason planner who’d met the residents and gone native. The protesters were a strange alliance of politicians and hippies, local residents, theatricals, market traders and, of course, the preservationists. In 1973, facing the conundrum of how to protect the piazza while also making positive noises to the planners, Secretary of State for t
he Environment, Geoffrey Rippon came up with a solution straight out of Yes Minister. He gave permission for the scheme to go ahead, while at the same time listing hundreds of buildings in the area, which rendered the redevelopment impossible. Instead, the area was regenerated, as Edinburgh’s New Town had been. Soot and grime were scrubbed from buildings and cobbles, and the twee stalls of the re-opened market hall played host to street theatre performances while the ghosts of the long-gone market porters looked on. When the right-to-buy policy came along in the eighties those former council residents who’d fought to save the area sold up and moved on.
Perhaps the most drastic piece of replanning that never came to pass in London was the inner ring roads. Abercrombie had proposed four arterial ring roads: radiating outwards from an inner ring feeding the centre of the city to a distant orbital road circling the outer suburban sprawl. What later became known as the ‘motorway box’ was the smallest of the rings, but also one of the most destructive, knocking its way through densely populated boroughs like Brixton and Islington. The nearest London got to the ‘box’ was the Westway, a raised section of urban motorway constructed in west London during the late sixties. Even this one relatively small scheme lay waste to great chunks of old housing, uprooting numerous communities in the process, and leaving those who found themselves suddenly living in the shadow of the flyover bitter and resentful. It crops up as the setting for local resident J. G. Ballard’s stunning 1974 novel Concrete Island, wherein the protagonist, a rich architect called Robert Maitland, crashes his Jaguar and ends up marooned on the central reservation at a motorway intersection. Far bigger redevelopments had happened to east London in the fifties, but this was different: since the early postwar years politicians and experts of all kinds had suffered a huge drop in credibility, with a new wave of satirists and an ever more critical media feeding on a plethora of political scandals. Ordinary people were coming to believe that their opinions mattered as they never had before. It’s also fair to say that the Westway affected more middle class communities than the East End rebuilding ever had, people who were more confident, vocal and influential than their working class equivalents. And even though the Westway protesters were not in the end successful, they did help inform those fighting against the motorway box.
Not that anyone knew about the plans at first. It was only in 1964 when Battersea Borough council couldn’t get planning permission to build a swimming pool, and with no reasonable explanation from London County Council forthcoming, that people began to suspect that something odd was going on. ‘The fact came out under persistent questioning,’ reported New Society magazine, ‘that the then London County Council was sitting on plans for a vast network of motorway rings round London, a section of which would sweep through the site where the baths might be.’21 As befitted the mood of the day, there were protests from the hastily formed London Motorway Action Group, soon joined by highly organised residents associations across London.
Yet it was the Land Compensation Act of 1973, which gave compensation to home owners if new road building lowered their property values, that really put paid to schemes like the motorway box, which came to be seen as liabilities of monstrous proportions for the cash-strapped councils involved. In a time of financial hardship this and most other comparable schemes all over the country, from Glasgow to Croydon, bit the dust. Today only the ‘barrier block’ in Brixton, with its hostile speak-to-the-hand design, and the Westway, with its eggbox-grey concrete marching on sturdy legs through Paddington, are there to remind us of what might have been for what soon became London’s gentrified core.
Most town and city planning departments faced the fallout from this heady mix of public protest and expert fatigue in the early seventies. One of the most spectacular meltdowns occurred in Newcastle, where T. Dan Smith had been working his magic since the fifties to transform the city into ‘the Brasilia of the north’. The plans were monumental: skyscraper hotels, rapid transport systems and town centre ‘streets in the sky’. Early developments such as Cruddas Park had been concerned with rehousing the poor from notorious slums. By the seventies it was about luxury flats in the city centre. Bewick Court, a 21-storey tower block built straddling a road in the heart of the city centre, sought to attract a new class of young urban professional – ‘doctors, civil servants, business executives, retired couples and young swingers’ – rather than the working-class families housed in most of Newcastle’s blocks.22
Bewick Court’s original residents were interviewed for the Newcastle Journal in 1972, in what is probably my favourite of all the newspaper articles I read during my research. Their answers revealed the new lifestyle to which the city’s young elite aspired – and it bore little resemblance to the communal fun and games that had characterised the early days of Cruddas Park. ‘I was the second person to move in,’ said resident Suzanne Burke. ‘I wanted the impersonal bit, the prestige of living here. Everyone loves a good address. I don’t want to know about Mrs Smith’s cake that hasn’t come out of the oven properly. If I bought some fish and chips but had no salt I’d go without. I wouldn’t borrow it off neighbours. I want to keep myself to myself.’ Kay Nicholls, 25, was if possible even more blunt. ‘We moved out of a new housing estate deliberately. We don’t really like knicker parties and coffee mornings, which is all you seem to get there. So we came here and we’re pleased.’ She added: ‘We’ve sold our car because there was nowhere to park it and it kept getting broken into.’ A young mother who’d escaped life in a pit village told the reporter: ‘In the village everyone knows everyone else’s business. I couldn’t go back to that.’ And then there was Alan Black, a young executive from the Department of Trade and Industry. ‘I could imagine that living here can be quite horrible,’ he said. ‘But I’ve escaped what I wanted to escape from.’23 Bewick Court wasn’t run by the council, but by a housing trust who, in a move no doubt designed to flatter the wallets of this generation of aspirational young executives, doubled their rent within a year.
These thrusting young business types needed somewhere suitably ritzy in which to spend what was left after the rent, and city architect Ken Galley had just the thing to offer them: a shopping mall in the heart of the grand old Georgian town centre. ‘We are determined we can do better than any other British city,’ he told the friendly journalists at the Newcastle Journal. ‘The ideas we have been developing for four or five years were confirmed strongly by our visit to America’ – by which he meant urban motorways, malls, walkways, and flats such as Bewick Court in the centre to keep the city alive at night.24 Newcastle’s plans didn’t go unnoticed in London. In 1970 the Illustrated London News interviewed the Journal’s cheerleading editor, Ian Fawcett, who told them that the new developments ‘could reverse the traditional north–south flow of people looking for a life with better prospects’.25 Fawcett’s influence can be felt on many of the Journal’s articles from this period, with their sunny glass-half-full attitude. ‘It looks as if Newcastle’s years of waiting will all have been worthwhile,’ he wrote in 1970. ‘The shopping centre planned for the city is nothing less than magnificent. … Only the passing of Eldon Square gives any major cause for tears.’26
Eldon Square was an instantly recognisable landmark: the centerpiece of the city’s Georgian plan. By the end of the sixties it had been partially demolished to make way for an American-style mall, a partnership between the council and developers Capital and Counties Property, and for the construction of a towering hotel, to be designed by Danish modernist master Arne Jacobsen. Yet in the midst of all this activity it suddenly became apparent that Newcastle City Council and Galley’s team had hugely underestimated the strength of affection among the city’s population for this grand landmark. Alan Brown’s letter to the Newcastle Chronicle in 1969 reflected a widely held view that Eldon Square was ‘being devastated to make way for a skyscraper hotel and shopping precinct … a hollow, meaningless showcase, a Brasilia, a little Los Angeles, a drive-in for motorway enthusiasts’.27 Architectural h
istorian Bruce Allsopp was in the vanguard of the battle against Galley’s plans for Newcastle’s centre. At a noisy public meeting he told the shellshocked planner that ‘the demolition of Eldon Square was a slap in the face of public opinion throughout the country.’28 A protest group, SOCE M (Save Our City From Environmental Mess), was set up, and Galley found himself and his work roundly pilloried in the press and in public. ‘It would have been much better if the great debate had taken place at the planning stage rather than now at the implementation stage,’ he ruefully told the still sympathetic Newcastle Journal in 1972.29 A few months later he vented his frustration further. ‘Just imagine how many would come to a planning meeting in Jesmond tonight. No hall would be big enough to hold them.’
Galley came from a generation of officials used to proceeding with their plans regardless of public opinion, in the unquestioned belief that they were right, and he was not alone in finding the adjustment to these new, more democratic times difficult. ‘Sometimes in moments of despair,’ wrote that expert of all experts, Dame Evelyn Sharp, ‘one wonders, in the Ministry, whether planning is possible at all, or at least whether it is worth the effort – and the abuse. But of course it is; if we didn’t have it we should have to invent it.’30
It wasn’t just protests that were doing for plans like Ken Galley’s. In a decade of global financial crises, strikes and IMF bailouts, the writing was on the wall for other city centre shopping malls. ‘With Nottingham’s Victoria Centre, Manchester’s Arndale and Market centres and London’s Brent Cross, Eldon Square represents an image of massive regional comprehensive shopping redevelopment unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future,’ wrote the Guardian in 1976. ‘It is a concept fallen out of fashion even before its results are realised.’31
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